Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Monday, January 05, 2015

Today, MLK Jr Would Be Unemployable in America, Given That He Would Be Anathema to Most Americans… of the Left (!)

For some reason,
Benny Huang ain't that impressed about Martin Luther King, Jr. He must be a racist or something. (Oh, wait; he is either Asian himself or married to one—I forget which—so that theory doesn't hold a lot of water…) Having said that, Benny Huang has shown in the past how much admiration he has for Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech, so let's hear what he has to say…

Left, right, and center, everybody thinks MLK was pretty cool.

The consensus, I believe, arises from the fact that most people
admire Martin Luther King for the man they wish he had been rather than
the man he really was. King has become the embodiment of justice, an
intangible element that is difficult to define because it means
different things to different people. Consequently, we create our own
images of who he was, some of which are divorced from reality.

That the real flesh and blood Martin Luther King does not conform to
the immaculate image that we have created for him should come as no
surprise. He was a mortal man.

What’s not to like about Dr. King? He
wasn’t a real doctor, for starters. His alma mater, Boston University,
admitted in 1991 that his PhD was secured through academic fraud. But
there are more reasons why conservatives and liberals alike should
dispense with the hero worship.

… Martin Luther King was sexist. There
were actually fewer women in King’s inner circle (zero) than former
members of the Communist Party (three that I have counted). Bernard Lee,
a personal assistant to King, spoke candidly on the subject:
“Martin…was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife
should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in
the streets.”

Perhaps he believed that Coretta should stay home with the babies
because he didn’t want her to discover his philandering? Sure, the fact
that King was an adulterer is old news. Liberals don’t care about that
stuff because they aren’t prudes like the rest of us; but would they be
bothered to know that he was physically abusive to women he was cheating
with? Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s second-in-command wrote in his
autobiography “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down” that King got into a
physical altercation with a girlfriend just hours before his
assassination. After losing his temper with her, “he knocked her across
the bed… She leapt up to fight back, and for a moment they were engaged
in a full-blown fight, with [King] clearly winning.”

Of course he was winning. He was a man beating up a woman. When he
talked about nonviolence what he really meant was that he avoided fights
with policemen. Fisticuffs with an unarmed woman was another matter
entirely.

King was also “homophobic,” which should come as no surprise to
anyone. [The charismatic black preacher who led the struggle against Jim Crow] spent his life studying a holy text, the Bible, that is
unequivocal in its condemnation of homosexuality. These days there are
some clergymen who preach the very unbiblical message that however your
wiggle your worm is okay with The Man Upstairs, which is supposed to
prove that there is a legitimate debate within Christianity concerning
sexual morality. There isn’t. “Anything goes” clergymen merely
demonstrate that some churches have given up preaching Christianity.

MLK, however, was not a twenty-first century, college town,
rainbow-flag waiving, post-Christian kind of pastor. He made his beliefs
clear in an advice column he wrote for Ebony magazine in 1958. A boy
asked for advice on how to deal with same-sex attraction. King
responded: “Your problem is not at all an uncommon one.” Problem? What
problem? He continued, sounding much like the Michele Bachmann of his
time: “…The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an
innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired…
Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to
some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit.” What
he’s saying is that the boy could change his sexuality if he tried hard
enough. Barbaric!

… To sum up King’s philosophy on
homosexuality, he believed that it was a “problem” that needed to be
“solved,” as well as a “habit” that could be ditched with the benefit of
a little psychotherapy. He essentially held the traditional view that
all Christians held for the first two millennia Anno Domini, that we
should hate the sin and love the sinner.

Will the revelation that King held such “unenlightened” views on
homosexuality change liberals’ attitude toward his marital infidelities?
Perhaps. If we learned anything from the Monica Lewinsky thing, (and
the Anthony Weiner thing, and the Gavin Newsome thing, and the John
Edwards thing) it’s that liberals are pretty blasé about adultery. It’s hypocrisy they don’t like. Cheat on your wife if you’d like, just don’t oppose the homosexual agenda. …